Colleges and universities can be relentless in pursuing their graduates for donations. They publish alumni magazines with glowing accounts of their faculty, students, and alumni, sponsor “Alumni Weekends” to show off new buildings and hear success stories, and of course, mail out regular solicitations with convenient return envelopes for donations. Although I have donated in […]
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In higher education, disgraceful scandals and major embarrassments once arrived one by one. Now, they appear in clusters, like epidemics we should have been expecting. Take the University of Tulsa, suddenly in the grip of a “strategic plan” aimed at marketing the university to students who are career-oriented and lured by the idea of fighting […]
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You might think that higher education leaders, who have almost all been steeped in the academic traditions of the free exchange of ideas, would uniformly stand up for free speech. Learning about those traditions is, after all, a key part of what college should be about for students. Sadly, college officials often bow down to […]
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Op-Ed: In contemporary America, women and men still act out ancient roles. From the point of view of the men, the society is a matriarchy: Women have physically less demanding jobs — with the sole exception of childbirth, by now a rare event in the average woman’s life. Women sustain far fewer injuries on the […]
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From supporting shout-downs and intimidation of conservative speakers to denying due process to students accused of sexual assault, stories regularly emerge that chronicle the liberal lopsidedness and lack of true viewpoint diversity among campus administrators. It is widely known that these omnipresent administrators – mid-tier staffers who occupy dozens of offices including diversity and inclusion, […]
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Two students wore blackface at the University of Tennessee in a Snapchat image with a racist caption. The University is responding by putting tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff through sensitivity training. It may even require the 186,000 minors participating in the state’s 4-H program to attend sensitivity training. It will also require students […]
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In an interview last year with ESPN, former OCR head Catherine Lhamon gushed, “The capturing of the hearts and minds of the American public is what has moved this issue. The response of student communities to sexual violence among athletes has been really important.” Lhamon could have been referring to the expulsion of former Yale […]
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As Anti-Semitism continues to grow unchecked on colleges campuses, and within a small cohort currently serving in the United States Congress, Belgium offers a glimpse into a frightening future for us if the hateful rhetoric is allowed to escalate. During the same week that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) complained about undue Jewish influence in this […]
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Despite being a small minority (5.8%) of the U.S. population, Asian-Americans have long been, and remain, at the center of current controversies over college admissions. Consider the relationship, if any, among the following: Students For Fair Admissions suing Harvard for discrimination against Asians. Harvard’s Admitted Class Has Record Share of Asian Americans. “Last week, Harvard […]
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Dissenting from the powerful progressive currents on our nation’s campuses can be very dangerous. Those who challenge the orthodox norms find little support among faculty, students, and administrators and can be severely punished socially and professionally. As I wrote here last week, students know that asking certain questions or holding particular public views can result […]
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The English departments of Cornell and Harvard have dropped the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) requirement for graduate applicants—a noteworthy move that amounts to a setback for the quality of education and a win for diversity and lower standards. Insidehighered.com reports the Cornell development and includes a link to a candid statement from the English department […]
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Progressive colleges are often the worst offenders in all the ideological bullying that stains our colleges these days. Take my own institution, Sarah Lawrence. During the 2016 election cycle, a week did not go by on my campus, without a student or a small group of students coming to me and sharing stories where they […]
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At Columbia University, the famous core curriculum, founded exactly one hundred years ago and centered on a rich, rigorous two-semester freshman course covering Western civilization from Plato to the present, remains in place and is largely the same as in 1919. But it’s a rare exception. One day in January 1987, hundreds of Stanford students, […]
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While one kind of diversity is mandated by our governments, educational and scientific agencies, colleges and universities, and industries, three other kinds of diversity are forbidden. The mandated diversity is defined in “social justice” ideology as the diversities of race, gender, sexuality, economic class, and ethnicity. “Social justice” is alleged to be equal representation of […]
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President Trump recently announced that he would issue an executive order permitting federal research money to be withheld from universities that violated free speech. This may appear as welcome news for fans of open campus debate, but I am not optimistic. The problems here are formidable under the best of conditions but, more important, the […]
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The recent college admissions scandal is spectacular in its size and scope, but hardly surprising. Let me make four major points. Whenever there are scarce resources in much demand and a non-market solution is used to allocate those resources, there are bound to be problems. At the schools involved in this admissions scandal, there are […]
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In my recent book, The University We Need, I wrote, “A moment’s reflection should confirm how strange it is that no leading university has been founded in the United States since Stanford in 1891.” The reason cannot be that no one has enough money to establish such a university because the United States has more […]
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Years ago, when our youngest daughter was a junior at Trinity, an exclusive private school in Manhattan, my wife and I attended a meeting with other parents in a large auditorium to listen to admissions officers of four of the eight Ivy League schools. They all spoke about their schools, and what was required for […]
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Sam Abrams, a conservative professor at Sarah Lawrence College, is about to become quite well known. Last fall he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, moderate in substance but muscular in tone, charging that college administrators across the country, are creating one-side progressive programs for college students to push students to the left. […]
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Should conservatives establish a new university of, by, and for conservatives? The idea has been relaunched about as many times as the Starship Enterprise. I first heard it in the 1990s, but doubtless, it is older. Most recently Frederick Hess and Brendan Bell at the American Enterprise Institute cast the vision in “An Ivory Tower […]
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